Dear Readers: This is the text of my talk for the inaugural online meeting of
Blue Earth Defense, 6 December 2025. This new group shows great promise!
MANY TROPICAL FORESTS are now releasing more carbon dioxide than they are storing, as insane as this sounds. That’s because of ongoing forest “clearing” for ever more wood products, agriculture, mining, and settlements in the Amazon, Congo basin, and areas of tropical Asia.
Destruction of nature is surging throughout the world. Conservation efforts to protect and restore life and the biosphere cannot offset the incredible scale of destruction. The global growth monster is winning at virtually every turn.
This horrific situation boils down to this: There are too many of us, and there are too many of us consuming too much stuff.
Good news: more and more young people understand what’s at stake—the future of the living world, and our very humanity. Photo by Visual Karsa on Unsplash.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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The underlying causes of immense overgrowth are as follows:
Cause #1. Extreme anthropocentrism, a fundamentally anti-life ideology of human supremacy and unlimited growth, amplified globally by western civilization and colonialism. Extreme anthropocentrism is what allows society to eliminate other life as an acceptable outcome of doing business.
When you consider the enormity of animal slaughter on the world’s roads and highways each day, not to mention what happens in slaughterhouses, you realize just how insanely desensitized modern humanity is to the plight of other life. A grossly anthropocentric society has no reason to limit itself, even at great risk of its own destruction.
Dealing with the problem of anthropocentrism requires a strong biocentric movement that emphasizes ecological justice and wellbeing of the entire living world.
Cause #2. Obsessive promotion of consumerism to a gullible humanity by corporations, political leaders, and economists, a process that’s increasingly supercharged through AI advertising and other technologies.
To remedy this problem there must be a strong social movement for a new way of living, a sufficiency way of life, for scaling down consumption while addressing economic inequity.
Cause #3. The Corporate State, the fusion of government and capitalism. This ensures little or no limitation on growth, on its negative impacts on life and the environment.
The solution is a political movement to free government from crony capitalism, and elect and empower new leaders in government who embrace steady-state economics and targeted economic degrowth.
Cause #4. Pronatalism, an ideology that pressures women and girls to bear children, promoted by politicians, mainstream media, corporations, social elites and many religious leaders. Environmentalists often aid and abet pronatalism by ignoring or denying overgrowth of human numbers.
The remedy is a strong social movement that empowers women, one that is pro-family planning, one that is integrated with those for sufficiency living and biocentrism, and one that emphasizes education and our ethical responsibility toward all life.
In terms of sustainability, these causes are the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse that drive Ecological Overshoot. This means that the Earth can no longer support its sacred diversity of life, regenerate essential resources, or deal with massive waste produced by the human enterprise.
Addressing overshoot requires dealing not only with the Four Horsemen—extreme anthropocentrism, extreme capitalism, extreme consumerism, and pronatalism—it also requires reversing the terrible damage to the living world that has already occurred. Call it re-wilding or call it nature recovery, it’s about restoring Earth’s living space and resources for more-than-human life. As moral beings, we are obliged to do so.
In closing, I appeal to every defender of Mother Earth to create a social movement that tackles those four interrelated causes of overshoot. Frankly, I can’t imagine an ecologically and socially just world without a holistic and cohesive environmental movement. Blue Earth Defense can help build that solidarity network.
For my advocacy work, I use the banner Scale Down to address the causes and remedies for ecological overshoot. Scale down posts and essays can be found on Facebook and Substack.
P.S. A related movie, highly recommended. Brace yourself for a tour de force—a powerful 3-hour presentation!
Please share this post and the movie.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Povilitis is a wildlife biologist and keen observer of people and nature. He concludes that only by scaling down humanity can we ensure the wellbeing of both.
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